the possibly naive pr{e,o}mise of the early web was that it would be a place for people who created content for the joy of creating it to share said content with people who would discover the delights of gatekeeper-free media consumption. "premium" content, that people were trying to make a living from selling, could go behind a paywall or into subscriber-only emails, the way books and magazines worked pre-web.<p>sadly, the implicit contract was broken on both sides. people didn't want to pay for content, but they also wanted to consume (pirated) premium stuff, rather than commons material, so there was never a concerted push to have better discovery mechanisms atop the freely-provided web. likewise, producers wanted to impose user-hostile measures like drm and geographic segmentation on a medium that was not conducive to them, making piracy the more attractive option even if you didn't care about free-as-in-beer.<p>professional producers had to go free because it was not a case of paid professional content competing with free amateur content; it was a case of paid professional content competing with free pirated professional content. that also sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the amateur ecosystem; who wants to dig through the virtual slushpile when you can get pre-curated professional material for free?<p>i'm sad about the whole thing because i was really looking forward to seeing if the creative commons would compete on its own merits as a mass entertainment option. once the reward of putting something up is not people reading and appreciating it, but money from ad clicks, though, the producer's incentives are suddenly misaligned with the consumer's, and we end up with the web of today :(